1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates in general to wireless communications systems, and in particular to a geo-stationary communications system with minimal delay.
2. Description of the Related Art
Communications satellites have become commonplace for use in many types of communications services, e.g., data trunking, voice communications, television broadcast, and other data transfer applications. As such, satellites transmit and receive large amounts of signals, used in either a “bent pipe” or “processing” payload configuration to transmit signals to desired geographic locations on the Earth's surface with multiple spot beams.
Because of the increase in satellite usage, the available resources on a given satellite have been completely utilized without providing enough bandwidth service to a desired geographic region. As such, users on the ground must either go without the satellite service, accept a reduced Quality of Service (QoS) for the satellite service, or timeshare the satellite service with other users, none of which are acceptable for users that require access to the satellite service at any given time. Further, the round-trip delay in communicating with satellites in geostationary (GEO) orbits approaches one half of a second, which can introduce data latencies that are troublesome in many applications. Mid-Earth orbit (MEO) and Low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations can provide improved performance over GEO satellite constellations, but these performance improvements are obtained at the expense of system complexity and cost.
It can be seen, then, that there is a need in the art for a communications system that provides high-speed and low latency access to the Internet and other terrestrial networks to a large number of users. The present invention satisfies that need